PPP' r- PAGE FOUR THE MICHIGAN DAILY THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1941 i _. IT SO HAPPENS... o Wampum-Mad World A FRIEND OF OURS was dragged from his "Today I am a BMOC," he said, rising from beautyrest the other night by one of thoseIhis cross-legged position on the floor. "tapping" organizations. * The miembers of the organization (who were u dtn ugh-ing all over the place) deposited our friend BlurredReltnship on the floor and did a chanty around him. E WERE TOLD recently of that most happy "Help, needum help," our friend cried weak- W of all occasions - a successful blind date. ly after the savages had departed. His room- Although both parties usually wear glasses, they mate claims Buck Jones couldn't have done left them home in the interests of social grace, and both had a wonderful time. * * * * AT EIGHT booms of the clock (that's Indian) But their troubles began the next day when AT ET bom ofnh, ock (that' ndian) tthey arranged a study date. With their glasses the next morning, our friend, enroute to on, neither one recognized the other. class, met the U. S. Mail at the door and found a letter from a fine old jewelry firm in Ann Arbor. It said in part: Watch That, Son' "Catch um TRIBE RING Costum Ten Rocks O NE OF OUR friends takes a great delight (Plus Plenty Pebbles for White Fathers)" in his course in elementary philosophy. He Our friend, marvelling at the rapidity of the rushed in yesterday to give us the lowdown mails these days, went over to a local haber- on the story of philosophy. dashery to replace his pajamas, which had been "MVost of those early philosophers were a reduced to threads in the holocaust of the little off-the-beam," hF said, "but this Pluto previous night. --he's terrific." S * * * * * * ALTHOUGH HE was unable to replace his Ready To 'Sell Short' sleeping apparel, our friend did not seem much perturbed over it. 0UR BRIGHT and able economics professor was all set when one of his students asked him when we will have deflation in the United NIGHT EDITOR: STUART FINLAYSON States. "I can give you the date," he said, "but I don't know whether it's in the morning or the Editorials published in The Michigan Daily afternoon." are written by members of The Daily staff and represent the views of the writers only. Contributions to this column are by all members of The Daily staff and are the responsibility of the editorial director. All or Nothing AFTER PRESIDENT Truman's Monday night address the Meat Packers and the Repub- licans might well declare a holiday. They have won their battle. It is almost laughable that Mr. Truman should lash out against those men who "are more interested in millions of dollars than in millions of people," and then conclude by de- claring meat controls abolished. If this had been the only way out of an otherwise politically fraught situation, the ad- ministration might plead expediency. But there were other ways of dealing with the intransigent MIVeat Trust. The Trumahi administration well knew that there was no real shortage of meat. They knew, too, that the four big Packers, Wilson, Armour, Cudahy and Swift, were exerting all of the pressure which a big trust possesses in its ef- forts to restrict the supply of meat. They were well aware that the only "real" solution lay in seizing the Packing houses and their subsidiar- ies and simultaneously recalling Congress for stronger control measures. .. True, they would have incurred the unending wrath of the in- dustrialists, those few who control so much in this country, but they would have gained more support for the administration from the broad masses of the people than they had ever had before. Nor are the President And his advisers the only ones to be blamed. Several of those men who have repeatedly fought for price control, including Senator Pepper, urged decontrol. To assume, as so many people have asserted, that rent controls can be maintained when a severe dent exists in other ceilings, is sheer nonsense. To hope that production can meet consumption in the scarce commodities, and thus avert inflation, is, at best, wishful thinking. The Industrialists know that it can't. The Ad- ministration knows that it can't. The only people who don't know that it can't are the majority of those small people who are the ultimate consumers. The result cannot but deepen the conflict between wages and prices. It cannot but lead to prosperity for the few, poverty for the many. -E. E. Ellis I'D RATHER BE RIGHT: The Iceman By SAMUEL GRAFTON I DO NOT KNOW what Mr. Eugene O'Neill's politics are, but I find it interesting that only now, after a lapse of twelve years, has he felt the urge to present a play. The great pessimist comes out of his retreat at a moment when man's hopes are at their lowest ebb. This is O'Neill climate; now he can operate; and he gives us, accordingly, "The Iceman Cometh," with its savage message that to face reality is to die, and that it is better to be deluded. The twelve years of Mr. O'Neill's absence correspond very closely to the thirteen years of the successive Roosevelt administrations. I do not know if Mr. O'Neill is consciously aware of the coincidence, or even whether he reads the newspapers; and I do not suggest that he is a Republican playwright. But a kind of point can be made, I think, to.the effect that this great, unhappy, confused man seems to find his release during static social periods when public sorrow more nearly matches his internal woe. For "The Iceman Cometh" would have seemed a little peculiar during the early Roose- velt days, when, for a time, we found ourselves hoping that men could live together in amia- bility and security. We might even have won- dered, without regard to period, why the snor- ing, destitute bums in his play weren't on work relief. And certainly the play would have seemed grotesque during the war years, our years of faith that we could have one world, and a good one. But Mr. O'Neill himself has become some- thing of an anachronism during these dozen years; a generation has grown up which hardly knows his name; and it makes a point about our times that only now does Mr. O'Neill turn to the public again, with "The Iceman Cometh." It is as if lie had waited patiently in the wings for our little period of joy and hope to spend itself; now he comes out, as one remind- ing us, almost with a leer, that life is a formless mess, to be tempered, if at all, with alcohol and illusion. The message, then, is that life is worthless, and in making us miss our cocktail hours to hear a poem in praise of whisky, Mr. O'Neill's play strangely resembles several other pessi- mistic plays lately produced in Paris by the new, negative philospohical movement known as Existentialism. Here we come to some large questions: Why does pessimism take the stage in two great Western nations, at the same time? Why do audiences accept it? The first point to be made, I think, is that public acceptance of these plays is a phenomenon of great, even frightening, current significance. Why, indeed, do men and women go to the O'Neill play, and respond to it? It is a valid question, for I am sure that the well-dressed, well fed socially gay audiences do not at all share Mr. O'Neill's view of life. And here one has an odd, but inescapable, feeling that the play actually comforts these audiences in some strange way, that has to do with the fact that this is a period of right- ward drift and noticeable political apathy. If life is basically worthless, and hateful, one is excused from having to meditate deeply on the fate of one's fellow men. These audiences do not really share Mr. O'Neill's bitter an- guish; they do not take from the play what he has put into it, but only as much as they need. They go out of the theatre, not to death, but to gin rummy, and golf, and to a time of increasing social unconcern. If life is hateful, yet worthy, one must try to improve it; but if life is hateful, and also worthless, one is ex- cused from work, even from thought; and what the audiences take from Mr. O'Neill's play is not his savage contempt for all of life, but on a quite different level, a kind of special permission to enjoy their own little segments of it, regardless of the rest. Mr. O'Neill gives them a way of hating their own society with- out having to improve it, a clear out for the twinging but lazy conscience. On this level, the O'Neill play becomes a fantastic phenomenon; it is pessimism serving sloth, and nursing the social destructiveness out of which itself has been born. One looks at it, fascinated, as at a crowning curiosity of our time; and Mr. O'Neill has never written a story so strangely tragic as this one, of the uses to which a social setting that he detests puts him. (Copyright 1946, by the N.Y. Post Syndicate) 'M"'. / .,1R .r l r '! _ ~ Ec oNF :r cor I ---------- i 'I \ I a R ;$ f SSS Copr, tt46 by Un;t